‘You can take her for a few hours,’ he said to Pieter. ‘I’m going to try and get some rest, if that’s possible.’
‘You do that, you look like crap,’ said Pieter. ‘We’re going to make it now, aren’t we, Max?’
‘I think we are. There’s nothing left they can throw in our way now.’
It was nothing but deep blue sea all the way to America.
Max unplugged from the comm. and climbed out of the pilot’s seat, suddenly aware of how stiff and drained he felt now that the danger was all behind them, and the adrenaline that had been pounding through his veins since take-off early this morning had finally subsided.
‘I’ll see how Stef is and get a dead reckoning off him before I get some shut-eye.’
‘All right.’
Max ducked through the bulkhead into the bomb bay and ducked again as he passed from the navigation compartment into the waist section. Stef was sprawled on the floor between the gun portholes where he’d left him, but was now covered in a thick grey blanket.
‘I found it in a storage locker,’ said Hans, sitting beside Stef, tucked up into a ball and hugging himself to stay warm.
‘Go sit up front with Pieter if you want,’ he said. It was much warmer in the cockpit, not having any openings to the cold wind outside and bathed in the sunlight streaming in through the cockpit windows.
‘Thanks.’ Hans clambered forward through the bulkhead.
The young man was still sleeping. Spread across Stef’s lap was the map he’d been using since they’d left the airstrip outside Nantes. He’d calculated a dead reckoning and circled it on the map with the time of the estimate. It was only fifteen minutes old.
Good boy.
Max laid the map out flat on the wooden-plank floor and calculated the course to the next waypoint. He then plugged himself into the comm. beside the starboard porthole.
‘Pieter, we’ve drifted north a little, new heading two-fifty-five. ’
‘Two-five-five.’
He looked at the young lad; he was pale, but breathing steadily. He lifted the blanket and studied the pale silk material of the parachute wrapped around the wound. Some more blood had soaked through, but it looked dark and dry. He could see no new blood.
He might yet make it, if they could get him to a doctor over there.
He felt exhaustion creeping up on him.
When I wake up, it’ll be time to ready the bomb.
His hand automatically slid beneath the leather flying jacket and felt anxiously inside his tunic pocket for the envelope Rall had handed him.
Still there.
He slid up beside Stef and pulled the blanket over them both, the heat of his body, for what it was, would help keep the lad warm.
The hardest part of the mission was over. Max realised now how dangerous the decision had been to land the B-17 on the strip. The enemy had nearly overrun those Alpine troops, and the bomb might have fallen into the hands of the Americans. It had all so nearly gone horribly wrong.
He wondered what the Americans would do with such a weapon in their possession. They would study the explosive formula and produce bombs like theirs in the thousands. It was too late in the day for them to drop them on Germany; there was no point. Russia possibly? That seemed probable. He imagined there must be growing fault lines between those two large countries. One capitalist, one communist, such a huge difference there must be in the way both countries, both people would view how the world should be after this war was done. He wondered how long the unlikely alliance between the two would have lasted if Germany had had the resources to hold out for another year.
He wondered what might have happened if they’d never bothered to attack the Russians in the first place.
He found his mind lazily pursuing ‘maybes’ and ‘what ifs’, the recreational pastime of historians and history teachers, as his eyes began to feel heavy and his head light, drifting with surprising ease towards sleep. The drone of the three remaining engines, and the roar and whistle of the wind past the portholes and over the ragged punctures in the fuselage, soon became a surprisingly relaxing lullaby.
Chapter 50
Running
Mark drove them for half an hour up the coast. At some instinctive level it had felt safer to them driving north-east out of town, and further into the New England coastal wilderness, rather than head out south-west back through Connecticut towards New York State. Mark drove them along the interstate, following it as it swung north, hugging the coastline where the Atlantic became Narragansett Bay.
They found a small motel just a few miles east of Kingston, beside an intersection coupled with a neon-lit, twenty-four-seven diner. Mark checked in and got them three rooms, while Chris and Wallace found a table inside the diner and ordered some strong coffee. Chris recognised ‘Counting Crows’ playing in the background. Someone here liked college radio.
When Mark had returned and the waitress had brought them the coffee, Chris turned to study Wallace.
‘Okay, Wallace, it’s show and tell time,’ he said, leaning forward on his elbows. ‘I think you can tell me and Mark here what’s down in that plane, and why it’s so goddamn important that we have a pair of hired killers set loose on us.’
The old man was looking less shaken and upset now as they sat in the diner. Chris hoped it had sunk in that he had been ‘rescued’, not abducted, that he and Mark meant no harm, that in fact they had put themselves at great risk to save him. Wallace was looking more composed, and Chris decided, frail old man or not, he was going to get the story out of Wallace one way or another, right now. And the old guy had better realise that the time for buggering around was over.
‘So? Let’s have it,’ added Chris.
‘Gentlemen,’ Wallace replied, ‘the less you know the better. Those men in that van, they’re after me, not you. It is me that represents a danger to them, or at least, who they work for, not you.’
‘Well, you know what? I don’t think they’re too fussy about taking us guys down alongside you, so I reckon that puts all three of us in the same boat. What do you think?’ Chris replied.
Wallace said nothing.
Chris had a gut instinct that the old man wanted to tell them what he knew, but something was holding him back. ‘Come on, man, both Mark and I are in this up to our balls now. What’s this all about?’
Wallace cleared his throat. ‘I met up with you only to warn you away from this, not to encourage you further. You’re in danger now, young man; you’d be in far greater danger if you knew what I knew.’
‘I think we’re past that point now. Come on, Wallace, what’s in that fucking plane?’
Then a thought struck Chris. ‘Or was there someone aboard that plane? Someone important? A defector perhaps, one of Hitler’s top men?’
Wallace said nothing.
‘Hitler?’
‘The less you know the better,’ replied Wallace.
Chris smacked the table with frustration. ‘Sorry, I don’t buy that shit any more. Those bastards are after all three of us. So just tell me what you know!’
Wallace leaned forward. ‘I have to go take a leak.’
Exasperated, Chris watched the old man shuffle out from behind the table and make his way slowly across the diner and through a swing door to the toilets.
‘Mark, he’s driving me bloody mad!’
‘Well, you wanted to rescue him. Maybe he’s right though. Maybe we don’t want to know what he knows. In fact, the more I think about it, I’d be quite happy to walk away from this not knowing any more. What if we drop him off into the care of the police and just walk away from this . . . whatever it is?’
Chris shrugged. ‘We could, but aren’t you curious?’
‘Not if it means being like him, spending the rest of my life jumping at shadows. There’s a point at which you’ve got to be sensible about things and just back off. I think when guys start turning over your room and shooting at you, that’s a pretty good sign you’ve reached that point.
’
Chris nodded. ‘But you see, I reckon we’re already targets now. Don’t forget, that bastard in my room was trying to take us down, and Wallace wasn’t with us then. I think we’re already targets whether we know what he knows, or not. We’re targets because we’ve been down on that wreck, because we’ve seen someth—’
Chris froze.
‘What is it?’ asked Mark.
‘It’s that gadget that was in the bomb bay, isn’t it?’
Mark looked puzzled and ran a big hand through his thick, coarse black hair. ‘What?’
‘You remember the thing I photographed? It was hanging in the bomb bay.’
‘Yeah.’
‘The bomb-bay doors were ripped off, gone. They must have been knocked away when the plane hit the sea. Think about it . . . they were probably open when it hit the sea.’
‘And?’
‘And, my friend . . . And? Don’t you see? The doors were open. They were planning to drop that thing on America.’
Mark’s eyes widened. ‘Do you think it was an -?’
‘An atom bomb? A German nuke? Shit . . . I bet that’s it!’ Chris said a little too loudly, and quickly looked around to see if his words had carried across the diner. The only other customers, three truck drivers propping up the counter, seemed lost in individual worlds of their own.
‘That’s the big deal . . . they got the atom bomb before the Americans, that’s got to be it.’
‘So why does someone want kill us, and your friend in the toilet?’
‘Why? Because . . . because of the political embarrassment? I don’t know.’
Mark shook his head. ‘No, I can’t see the US government wanting to kill us over something like that. It’s history for chrissakes, maybe embarrassing history, but it’s all in the past.’
‘Yeah? I’m pretty sure there have been people shut up in this country for less; especially these days, my friend.’
‘Not for something like that . . . so the Germans had a nuke, so what?’
‘I dunno, maybe there’s more to it. We’ve got to go down and do another dive on the plane. I’ve got no bloody pictures any more. We have to go down and look at that thing again.’
‘If that thing down there is what this is all about, then there could be a risk of radiation leakage,’ warned Mark.
‘Fine, then we can take down a radiation meter, a Geiger counter. If it starts pinging, then that’ll confirm it, all the better,’ said Chris. He looked up from the table. There was still no sign of Wallace. ‘He’s taking his time isn’t he?’
At that moment the swing door to the toilets opened, and Wallace appeared.
‘Ah, there he is,’ said Mark. ‘So, you’re going to mention the bomb to him? See how he reacts?’
‘Yeah, let’s see how this wily old bugger responds to that.’
Chapter 51
Surrender: Mission Time: 10 Hours, 6 Minutes Elapsed
5.11 a.m., EST, the White House, Washington, DC
The meeting was still in session and it had been since midnight. The President, the Joint Chiefs and his war cabinet were looking ragged and tired. There had been a break, ostensibly for refreshments, but mainly it had been an opportunity to cool down fraying tempers.
The first hour of the meeting, up until 1.30 a.m., had been spent drafting high-level emergency orders to be despatched directly to General Eisenhower in France. The orders had been wired immediately, and confirmation that Eisenhower had received and read them had returned within the hour. The orders had contained a number of precautionary measures. Many, Wallace suspected, were probably too late to have any effect on whatever plan the Nazis had put in motion. No large planes were permitted to fly for the next twenty-four hours, all fighters based in southern England, France, Holland and Belgium with a suitable range had been issued orders to patrol the Channel and the north-west coast of France. In reality, there were going to be very few fighters they could mobilise at such short notice to cover this kind of area. Wallace considered it a desperate panic measure, but there was little else Truman could do, so it seemed.
On this side of the Atlantic, there was even less that they could do to prevent it happening, if they were indeed to be the target. There were no anti-aircraft defences along the east coast, and only a few symbolically placed around the White House. There were one or two placed on the rooftops of the tallest buildings around Times Square, more for show than anything else. There was no radar matrix established that could pinpoint any intrusion of airspace approaching America, as was the case for the south coast of England. It seemed obvious now, thought Wallace, why the Germans would pick America as the target for a weapon like this. Separated from the war by thousands of miles of water, the country had allowed itself to become a soft target.
The orders had been sent, but Wallace felt this was no more than a little feel-good medicine for Truman.
Since the despatching of these orders, Truman had used the time to go over once again the validity of the atomic threat. Wallace’s scientific contribution was closely questioned, while a senior member of Oppenheimer’s team, currently in Washington to prepare a detailed brief of the Manhattan Project for the new President, had been hauled out of bed in a nearby hotel and driven to the White House. The poor man, Dr Frewer, had been hastily fed a breakfast roll and given a black coffee to wake him up. Once he had been roused and brought up to date on events, he, too, had scoffed at the idea that the Germans were capable of making such a bomb and had been dismissive of the fast-cycle emission theory, calling it ‘hokum science’ at best.
Truman had questioned the man himself and, like Wallace, Frewer could only offer the assurance that the theory was extremely unlikely to work. He too had refused to say impossible, though.
That had seemed to have a profound effect on the President.
The sun had been up for some hours over DC and flooded into the conference room as the meeting reached a natural break, and Truman allowed them all a chance to step away from the table and visit the staff canteen for a late breakfast. He wanted them all back for half past eleven.
Wallace chose to freshen up and visited the washroom down the hall. He rinsed his face with cold water and stared wearily back at the young man in the mirror, as water dripped from the tip of his hawk-like nose.
He wiped his face dry. Right now, he’d rather return to the secure, comfortable and predictable routine he had been enjoying at Stanford only six short months ago and be blissfully unaware of the chaos here in the White House.
He did up his collar button, picked up his tie and made a quick job of a tidy bow. With a lick of his hand he smoothed down a tuft of hair on his crown and left the washroom, heading up the hallway to the conference room, feeling a little better.
He passed an ornate clock on a walnut side table and it chimed the quarter hour past eleven noisily.
Hitler’s deadline was now only a few hours away.
Despite remaining unconvinced that the Germans had the bomb, he was beginning to feel uneasy about the approaching deadline for the demonstration. They had exhausted so much valuable time discussing the possibility of an atom bomb that he felt a nagging concern that other possible forms of attack had been inadequately reviewed. Granted they had that garbled message from some alleged technician that the Germans had managed to produce something and move it before it could fall into American hands. Of course, that could easily have been staged for their benefit, to underpin the bluff, a simple attempt at throwing them a curve ball.
But then there had been the exchange this morning between some of their Air Force boys and a Luftwaffe squadron of fighters escorting a B-17.
A B-17 . . . that was worrying. A flying fortress was the only plane the Germans might conceivably have got their hands on that had the range to cross the Atlantic. They had no planes of their own with that kind of range, not even their Fokker-Wulf Condor.
He found himself wondering whether that, too, was a part of the bluff. To fly right across French airspace
, with every chance they might be discovered, rather than some more discreet route, for example from Norway, across Iceland and down to the US.
Maybe they’d wanted to be discovered?
The more he thought it through, the more it seemed that an atom bomb delivered by plane across the Atlantic was hokum, a theatrical and dramatic bluff, the sort of stunt he could imagine a madman like Hitler would want to pull off. Perhaps it was more than a bluff? Perhaps it was a decoy, to distract their attention from the real threat, whatever that was. Flying openly across French airspace . . . ?
It was a goddamn bluff.
Wallace had talked quietly with Dr Frewer about the infinite chain reaction theory while both of them had taken an opportunity to smoke a cigarette in an alcove just outside the conference room. Frewer had said the same as he had in the room, that the possibility of the fast-cycle theory working was minuscule.
And yet there seemed to be some circumstantial evidence building up. Of what, he wasn’t sure. But he could understand Truman’s growing belief that the atom bomb threat was real. The President didn’t understand the science and had the recently assigned responsibility of the office weighing heavily on his shoulders. He was being cautious, waiting as long as he dared before making a decision.
Just a few hours to go.
All of a sudden, Wallace heard the pounding of feet on the thick carpet of the hallway behind him. He turned to see a man in uniform run past him and up the hall to the conference room. He was let in immediately by the marines in dress uniform guarding the double doors.
Jesus Christ, what now?
Wallace quickened his pace up the hall and nodded to the marines, who recognised his face from the several washroom exits he’d made during the morning, and opened the doors for him.
Truman was being handed a slip of paper. He pulled up his glasses to read it as the other men in the room quickly quietened down and studied their President’s face for a flicker of reaction.